Family Firms and Bribe Payments in Developing Countries: The Moderating Role of Social Capital

Chrysovalantis Gaganis, Fotios Pasiouras (), David Roubaud and Linda D. Hollebeek
Additional contact information
Chrysovalantis Gaganis: University of Crete
Fotios Pasiouras: MBS School of Business
David Roubaud: MBS School of Business
Linda D. Hollebeek: Sunway University

Journal of Business Ethics, 2025, vol. 202, issue 1, No 11, 242 pages

Abstract: Abstract Despite important research advances in the areas of family firm ownership, social capital, and bribe payments, their three-way theoretical and empirical relationship remains unexplored. To address this gap in the literature we use a sample of 13,639 firms from 25 developing countries and examine whether and how social capital moderates the association between family firm ownership and bribe payments. The results show that greater family ownership is associated with a higher proportion of sales paid in bribes. Consistent with our expectations, country-level social capital moderates this relationship. As country-level social capital increases, the positive impact of family ownership falls and after a certain threshold the relationship between family ownership and bribe payments becomes negative. Social capital also moderates the relationship between family involvement in key managerial positions and bribe payments. Finally, the results show that the moderating role of social capital is facilitated by its components of social and civil participation, personal and family relationships, and social networks; however, the components of interpersonal and institutional trust do not appear to play a moderating role.

Keywords: Family firms; Bribes; Corruption; Social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-025-05950-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:202:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-025-05950-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-025-05950-w

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().